The sneaky ‘e’ is a wink to Madame Ségolène Royal who is the Parti Socialiste‘s candidate. She’s been a bit creative with her campaign by appending an ‘e’ (signifying the feminine form) to the word président, creating ‘présidente’. This is notable because président is normally a masculine word, and because everyone is making a huge fuss about how she’s a woman. Early in the campaign (which only officially started today) she was asked, ‘But who will take care of the children?!’ France may be more progressive than some states but in other ways it seems as progressive as a glacier. They’re as chauvinist as any rabid Republican in the US, but fiercely proud of their liberties, equalities and fraternities, as long as that doesn’t include women being paid equally to men, equal treatment of immigrant groups and so forth. It’s a funny place; I love it.

At around 10:30 last night I was randomly channel surfing and came across a promo for the news of TF3 (Télévision France 3). Because I was in that exhausted phase that I get for a while after a really good but hard run, I decided to wait around for this news program. While waiting for it, rather unexpectedly, I was presented with 15 minutes or so of political ads for the various Presidential candidates. I read the newspapers here a lot so actually catching these things was fascinating; even more so because I’ve been taking a class on Political Communication in which the professeur would each week give us a summary of the campaign and often show clips of the high profile interviews of each (main) candidate. A couple things that I thought of on seeing these ads:

• At times the fringe parties do themselves no favors. They use their allotted time to show themselves chatting with ‘representative’ citizens on the street. This doesn’t work because combined with people talking in odd accents and too fast, fast cutting of the film, the subtitles (show for all candidates) and the possibility of picture-in-picture to make room for someone signing the broadcast, there’s too much going on. It looks disorganised. Viewers don’t care about having to watch other ‘ordinary’ people question a politician: they’re not very good at it. We know this because we have professional interviewers who find it hard enough with training. ‘Everyday people’ doing their job just makes the citizenry stupid.
• The far left liberals don’t need to put everything they display on a red background. It’s already clear they’re the communist party. They did, however, have by far the best presentation, with ‘live’ text on the screen and short snippet-like responses: the kind of thing needed to keep a viewer interested. How many people will really wait for 15 minutes to see all of the broadcasts? I’m guessing, not that many.
• Ségolène Royal had active and lively graphics but instead of showing a lot of what she had done, most of the time, as when they had dozens of clips of her in bubbles flying toward the viewer, it made the production look amateur. She was also the only candidate who didn’t face the camera head on. She looked like she really meant to talk to somebody else on the other side of the room rather than the camera.
• There was no mention of the Iraq war in any of the broadcasts. The top topics were unemployment (‘le chômage est beaucoup trop haut’), tax on business , immigration (‘nous avons toujours la peur dans notre pays’) and nationalism (‘being a citizen should be an honour not a right!’), the environment, economic protectionism (I’ll tell Bruxelles to…’) and a need for a renewal of social values. Many of the broadcasts seemed to say absolutely nothing at all, or at least ten seconds after their end I’d already forgotten the content.
• Neither Bayrou, Le Pen nor Sarkozy were on tonight. Perhaps that’s a special treat for tomorrow.

In the news, the thing that really struck me (call me strange), is that the ads on political billboards put up in every town (normally outside schools and other public buildings) are put up by ClearChannel. ClearChannel, an American multinational that controls billboards all over the world, hundreds of radio stations in the US and a large number of concert venues and promotion vehicles. I just think it’s ironic that a company that stands for so much that France is actively against is the one actually promoting their political process.

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